The Incredible Untapped Potential of the Human Race

I have just a bit shy of 2,000 friends on facebook.  When I first signed up I thought, dang, this is cool, I’m just going to add everybody I can as a friend and soon I’ll have millions of friends, which means millions of readers for my blog because, as you can see, I am not a terribly realistic person.  Then I found out that facebook has a limit of 5,000 friends which made me think “How very anal of them” because, really, what business is it of Mark Zuckerberg’s how many friends I have or how shallow I choose to be in my relationships.  Nonetheless, I set my new goal at 5,000.  After I hit the  1st 1,000 or so, I began to get bored with the quest.  First, it really slows things down and I have a hard time scrolling through all the nonsense to get to people I actually know or people who I actually care what they say, secondly readership at my blog has not increased correspondingly.  Fair enough, I must say.  If I were reading the blogs of all my facebook friends who have blogs, I wouldn’t have any time left over for things like sleeping, eating and going to the bathroom, much less work.

So, I’ve been thinking, I need to have a culling session, a night of the long knives, a trimming of the dead branches to give more vitality to the fresh, green buds.  Really, I do not care that your husband just bought you a box of fried chicken, or that the clouds, wherever the hell you are and how am I supposed to know if you don’t say, have you depressed.

Then, just now, facebook friend Donna Kuhn, who I do not know in real life, posted this: as i woke up this sentence popped into my mind: foo foo my brain is a paradigm. should i go back to sleep?!

This totally made my day.  What a beautiful thought.  Everybody’s brain is a paradigm, we have 8 billion completely unique ways of looking at the world. 

In a way, of course, this is the source of our problems.  When I say democracy and Sarah Palin says democracy, we do not mean exactly the same thing.  When I say bicycle ride and Lance Armstrong says bicycle ride an entirely different set of images flash across our individual screens.  It makes communication difficult.

Viewed in a different way, it is a very positive, optimistic thought.  There are 8 billion paradigms, 8 billion visions of the ideal world out there and, with the tool of language and communication systems like facebook (may its successor be somewhat less anal), we can compare them and construct something completely new, and beautiful and absolutely amazing.

Thanks for the thought, Donna.